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>> Friday, October 4, 2013

Gary is the creative director of Sidewalk Studio, responsible for superb titles like Surf City and Wacky World of Miniature Golf. He is also a pioneer, having created the standard to put movies on cd-i, thus paving the way for DVD. He shares his memories of Philips cd-i with Alan on Philips CDi Zone; now also on Interactive Dreams.Gary is pictured here on holiday with his wife Rebecca Newman, who was the manager of Sidewalk Studios. Both an MBA and a fine artist, she added greatly to the smooth running of the large team there. Gary reminisces about his time working on philips cd-i ''During the course of our eight years at Philips Media, over time those of us at Sidewalk Studio improved our software, our production techniques, and our understanding as to what we were doing creatively. Due to my narrative background as a Hollywood screenwriter and movie aficionado, and the characteristics of CD-i as a television peripheral device with the benefit of a standard format as opposed to the continually changing technology of computers, this led to a certain approach in our group. This was to explore potential interactive genres for children.''

"Surf City" was of a labor of love where we were trying to expand what the category for children could mean. "Surf City" was designed for kids who were a bit older and who might enjoy the mixture of Beach Boys music, the geography of a beach town circa 1966, animated music videos, amusing games that referenced the 1960's, and a narrative that was woven in and among all of these to tell a typical story of teenage love. With regards to the Beach Boys soundtrack, we were trying to get the rights to their music for a while when, finally, someone named Ted Cohen, who had background in the music business and who was married to a Philips Media executive, Laura Cohen, became essential to working out the deal and the rights issues. Of course, as was the case at the time, rights holders had no idea as to what we were doing, so we had to endlessly describe the project as best we could and we were able to make deals that no traditional entertainment format could possibly have made. If "Surf City" had been a movie, the rights would have had to be perpetual and they would have cost a great deal more.

So many of the holes in Wacky Golf were crazy--and funny. The game was made with a number of devoted people who had a bit of sadistic fun in them and kept adjusting the holes to make them more and more difficult. I speak specifically of Dug Ward who had a lot of creative input on the holes and Todd Williams who kept turning the screws tighter as we developed the title. Also, "Wacky Golf" had the same art director, Alex Stevens, as many of our other titles, so he contributed greatly to the look of this comic and playful miniature golf course. And Brian Truitt was the editor on these sequences (as he was on all of our Sidewalk Studio titles) who helped perfect the timing. In fact, Brian was the longest lasting person on our team, besides Rebecca and me. As with all the titles, Rebecca and I were also involved in the planning and execution of "Wacky Golf." But I think on this one there were more hands involved in the design than usual, in particular Dug Ward, and it turned out well for their involvement.A lot has been talked about regarding the difficulty of producing games on the cd-i platform. For you, what were the major obstacles?Wow! Are you kidding?! The obstacles were innumerable. Unfortunately, every producer or production group was left to solve these on his or her own. We were fortunate in that our early titles, such as "Cartoon Jukebox" and "Sandy's Circus Adventure," which we made under Frank Huttinger, who had hired us and was our old friend, were very well liked. For those titles, for example, we had to figure out everything. While off-the-shelf software was utilized, we used it almost as soon as it was released and we had to combine anything like that with tools we ourselves created that would work together. We also had to develop software that would run video and audio in synchronization, something that was not native to the CD-i machine. So as to keep everything in order, Rebecca, whose MBA was in Marketing and Information Systems, worked with the software engineers assigned to us to develop an eight-digit file management system, wherein each digit represented a different file state. This allowed us to always know which file was a later file and should be used in the disc build. Seems obvious, right? But other groups were not so lucky to have Rebecca working with them. They didn't remember which files were which and everything was a disorganized mess. And so, while we began working on these two titles well after others started their own, "Cartoon Jukebox," as I recall, was the first CD-i title ever finished. They even had a little party for it. Furthermore, we eventually finished six of the first 32 titles available for the initial release of the CD-i platform. This was because we had conquered so many technical problems and also because we were smart enough to be unusually well organized.

Did you have any games in the pipeline for cd-i, which were unreleased? Is there a game that you would have liked to produce for the system? We had planned a title called "Junior Detective" that was a teenage adventure game set in a science fantasy future. We wrote the story concept, created the production designs, but it never moved forward, unfortunately, due to various issues. Too bad. Fortunately, at Sidewalk we didn't have too many titles like that and this was a big difference from my life in Hollywood where I would write scripts that would never see the light of day or where they did get produced were so changed by subsequent writers or the director that I never knew whether I had done something wrong or whether it was done wrong by others. The great thing about Sidewalk Studio for me was that I had rather complete creative control. So while there were many contributors to our titles without whom they would not have been as good, if something was wrong with one of them, it was most likely my fault and if something was right then it was because I thought it was worthy enough to release to the public. Our last two titles were CD-ROMs: "Babysitter's Club Friendship Kit" (based on a well-known girl teen series of books) and a wonderful original title "Story About Me." Unfortunately, neither was released by Philips because it closed down first. "Babysitter's" was sold off to another distribution company whereas "Story About Me" just never got released although we finished it. It would be instructional to see the difference between these two titles and our last two CD-i titles because they are clearly different, designed to utilize the more tool-like nature of the computer as opposed to the entertainment nature of the television.What do you think is the main reason that the cd-i did not take off? I think it was a mixture of issues. At the basic level, no one in marketing had figured out where in the store the player would be sold. Was it an audio device, a television device, a game device? Also, it seemed to us that it wasn't sold well for what it was. It was sold as a hodgepodge. Then, there were the external issues, the fact that computer games which involved more recombination of elements than audiovisual display were worked on by so many different developers. Of course, the irony is that nowadays those games developed for Windows 95 or whatever can't be played while, if one has a CD-i player, all the discs are still playable.Do you think that cd-i was ahead of it's time? Actually, it was out of sync of its time and I think this was because the marketing folk and hardware engineers at Philips Electronics never thought hard enough about what they were creating. Therefore, the CD-i machine was in a marketplace competing with the computer world, on the one hand, and the proprietary television peripheral systems (Nintendo, PSX, etc.) on the other hand. This is because of the nature of creating a fixed standard is something the Consumer Electronics industry always does, and the benefit of this is that all CD's play on all CD players and all CD-i discs play on all CD-i players. But CD-i was competing against both the computer industry and proprietary standards that allowed for for continuous hardware and software development. And the way things were and are is that games players prefer their machines to continually expand the edges of technology rather than have something that can be played on any player anywhere always. I think, also, there were some execs at Philips who didn't quite understand what the overall market was like.

Do you look back fondly on your time working on philips cd-i titles? Absolutely. For those of us who worked at Sidewalk, it was a highly enjoyable experience. The people were so great, both individually and in mixture. Combining game designers, software engineers, production managers, animators, writers led to a stimulating environment. Many of them said it was the best place they ever worked and Rebecca and I would absolutely agree. Of course, Sidewalk wasn't the only successful group, but we were one of the few which were most successful.

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